2. There are many people without whom this book would not be possible. First, the
team at Carousel30, the digital agency which was founded nearly nine years
ago,has been instrumental for doing much of the work that led to the knowledge
and insights forming the core of this book. Their tireless work over close to a dec-
ade has transformed organizations and led to innovations in the digital marketing
space, and we cannot thank them enough for their help. We'd also like to thank
Janelle Kihlström, Breeanna Beckham, Whitley Gaffney, Anna Steely and Kaitlin
Carpenter. These individuals not only hid any awkward sentences from view, but
helped edit this book into its current form.
Just as importantly, the many organizations we have had the honor and privilege
to work with over the years have helped to shape this work. These have ranged
from large international organizations with sophisticated marketing and develop-
ment teams to small, one-to-two-person nonprofits that were just getting off the
ground. While each of these companies’ challenges shared similarities, the solu-
tions they required were unique. Without them, much of the data and knowledge
gained would have been secondhand research instead of on-the-ground experi-
ence. It is an honor to have worked with some truly brilliant people –both in their
fields of expertise and in the realms of digital marketing.
This is the second part of the Carousel30 white paper series on how to build a digi-
tal strategy for nonprofits. We have decided to call this one a book, based on its
length and format. It incorporates the content from the first part, with some slight
updates, into the chapter entitled “Building Blocks of Your Digital Strategy.”
i
Acknowledgements
3. “When we change the way we communicate, we change society.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing
Without Organizations
Background
This book is the culmination of years of working with nonprofits, government agen-
cies and for-profit companies on website projects, marketing and advertising cam-
paigns, social media marketing, email initiatives, membership recruiting and reten-
tion, and other activities that were critical to the growth and success of those or-
ganizations. Even more importantly, it is the culmination of getting to know all of
those organizations and striving to create cohesive strategic plans that tie high-
level organizational objectives to tactics.
In late 2003, it was quite possible that a traditional advertising agency would have
taken a slightly different approach to such challenges as growing donations, mem-
bership, issue advocates and the like. Carousel30, however, was born in the age of
social media startups like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. This has
helped inform our approach to a holistic marketing strategy that balances an or-
ganization’s business goals with measurable audience goals. This can be applied to
all of your digital properties and tactics, while maintaining a close relationship to
your offline marketing tactics.
From our experiences, we developed a process to create a digital strategy for any
nonprofit organization. This straightforward, simple process is easy to follow and
adjust over time. This is not to say that every organization is the same, but when
you understand the fundamentals you can easily modify the process to suit your
organization’s needs.
The Purpose of This Book
There are several good white papers, books, articles and blog posts about digital
strategy out there. This book’s purpose is to fill what we consider to be a void and
give people who work at nonprofit organizations a very practical, step-by-step
guide to creating a digital strategy from scratch and putting a program in place to
make it a living document that can be continually revisited and refined.
Carousel30 has used this process many times and seen great results for clients
both small and large, with both locally focused and national campaigns. The best
part is that this process is easy to follow and the elements you need to get started
are things you most likely already thought through. This approach is simply a way
to organize all of your goals, audiences and measurable objectives into a clear and
strategic plan.
This book also combines the previously published Part 1 with many additional com-
ponents in order to give a complete view and lifecycle of the digital strategy proc-
ess.
Who Is It for?
For this guide, we have put a specific focus on the needs of nonprofit organizations,
and it is our hope that many marketing professionals in those organizations will
get the chance to read and utilize these methods to improve their digital marketing
endeavors. Overall, the same general principles apply to both nonprofit and for-
profit businesses, but some specific goals like supporting social causes and tactics
ii
Introduction
4. such as collecting donations (as opposed to selling goods or services) make some
strategies different.
Also, this book is geared towards people in a marketing function within an organi-
zation. While we briefly discuss technology infrastructure in this book, the primary
goal here is to give marketers the building blocks they need to do their jobs and to
create an initial digital strategy or review the current one. While Carousel30 has
much expertise in technology strategy, infrastructure and development of technol-
ogy solutions, this book is focused on providing digital marketers with the informa-
tion they need to create a digital marketing strategy.
That being said, we think there is plenty here for anyone who is tasked with creat-
ing or defining their organization’s digital strategy. By the end of the process you
will have all of the information you need to:
• Make important decisions about how time and budget are spent.
• Have clear metrics to determine the effectiveness of your digital properties
and tactics with your primary and secondary audiences.
And finally, you will have a rationale to justify new tactics or make tough choices
about programs to cut or avoid.
What Does This Book Not Do?
Arguably as important as what it is supposed to do is what this book is not in-
tended for. The purpose of this book is not to give tips on social media marketing
or other specific tactics such as email marketing best practices, or membership
management, volunteer recruiting or advocacy best practices. There are plenty of
other books that go into much detail about those things. While it is very important
that you have a well-rounded understanding of how to use different tools and tac-
tics effectively in order to build your digital landscape, we are not going into much
(if any) detail on the subtleties of communicating with your constituents on Face-
book vs. Twitter vs. Pinterest. The focus here is really on the fundamentals of relat-
ing goals to strategies to tactics and then measuring those results to define and
refine your strategies.
Dive In and Get Started
The best way to begin a transformation of your organization’s digital marketing,
communication and infrastructure is to dive into the process outlined here. It is a
cyclical process that allows you to revisit your initial assumptions and to adjust
your strategies and tactics based on real, measurable outcomes.
Best of all, it’s not something you have to do alone. Throughout each of the four
major steps in the process we’ve outlined the team that is recommended to help
with each step. A larger organization might have many or all of these resources in-
house. A smaller organization might need help from consultants or contractors to
fill some roles, or might decide to combine a few roles based on individual experi-
ence and expertise. A third option is to bring in an agency that specializes in this
sort of thing to be a third-party, objective advisor. Any of these options have
worked well for many organizations before you.
Good luck!
iii
6. A Guide to Help Achieve Your Goals and Measurements to
Show How Well They Are Achieved
Digital strategy is the process of translating an organization's goals into a plan that
will create effective digital marketing initiatives. It is the first step in determining
the tactics that will be used to achieve success for your organization.
A digital strategy addresses several aspects of an organization’s needs. It translates
organizational goals and objectives into a strategy that optimizes the effects that
digital marketing initiatives have on the organization. This is done through the fol-
lowing:
• Identifying organizational goals with the understanding that digital assets
and tactics will be used to help solve them.
• Analyzing and prioritizing constituent needs and goals that the organization
can adequately address and improve through digital tactics.
• Creating a strategic plan for how the organization’s digital properties will
accomplish organizational objectives and customer goals, as well as a plan
to measure its effectiveness in each.
• Determining the digital properties and tactics that can best support this
strategy and then implementing a measurement plan that will illustrate its
effectiveness.
• Implementing a plan of review and evaluation in order to continually im-
prove the digital strategy and the results it offers.
This translates into tactics such as the creation of marketing and advertising plans,
technical infrastructure recommendations, reporting and analytics frameworks
and plans, digital brand guidelines, and a plan to manage the brand across plat-
forms and mediums.
If you are not taking a step towards your goals with the time, energy and dollars
you are spending to market your organization, you might as well be taking a step
away from them.
A digital strategy provides your campaigns and projects with guidance and insight
to ensure that all of your work is aligned with the overall goals of the organization.
You benefit from focused campaigns and tactics that achieve measurable results.
Those results are directly tied to the metrics by which your organization bases suc-
cess.
The danger of not creating a comprehensive digital strategy is that you will instead
end up focusing simply on a myriad of tactics that are not directly aligned with or-
ganizational goals.
It All Starts with Organizational Goals
In Jim Sterne’s book, “Social Media Metrics,” he outlines the three fundamental
goals of a business:
1) Increase Revenue
2) Decrease Costs
3) Increase Customer Satisfaction
While #1 might take on a slightly different meaning for a nonprofit organization —
substitute “Revenue” with “Contributions” for instance — the idea remains the
same. For #3, you could easily substitute “Increase Customer Satisfaction” with
“Retain Supporters/Donors/Volunteers.”
While there are a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, a common list of needs/
challenges/goals might include several of the following:
1) Increase Donations and the Cost Per Acquisition of Each Donor
2) Increase Membership and Member Retention
3) Increase Awareness and Positive Sentiment of an Issue
4) Increase Volunteers and Corporate and Individual Partners/Sponsors
5
7. 5) Increase Legislative Activity Around an Issue
Ultimately, the work that you do as a result of your digital strategy must address at
least one (or more) of these goals to truly be successful. Simply increasing the num-
ber of Twitter followers or posts on your Facebook Wall is not enough, unless those
items are tied to these goals, but we’ll walk through how to go about doing this as
we go through the process in a later chapter. Furthermore, you must be able to
clearly show the relationship between your digital marketing activities and the
change in effectiveness of these goals.
Similar to those three overall business objectives, a digital strategy has some things
it must support as well. In Accenture’s podcast, “Leveraging Opportunities in the
Digital Age for Banking,” John Keast outlines three things your digital strategy
should support:
1) Generating Leads
2) The Ability to Direct Leads to the Right Channel
3) Increasing Conversion Rate and Enhancing the Customer Experience
In the case of a nonprofit organization, a lead would be a potential donor, volun-
teer or other type of supporter, but the overall idea is the same. We want to create
strategic goals that align with these three things and then tie them to the overall
business objectives we defined earlier. The process we will go through will help you
to do this and go well beyond that to identify your primary audiences, their needs
and goals, and ultimately create a plan that is both measurable and ties in full-
circle with your organizational objectives.
In the past, the creation of a digital strategy took on a much more linear form.
Much work would be put into the initial crafting of the strategy, and then it would
be executed at a later point in time. More recently, with the advent of better and
more accurate means of capturing and reporting on analytics, this linear process
has turned into the cyclical one as pictured in the circle diagram in the introduc-
tion (and throughout this book). We will still spend the time necessary to do re-
search and craft an intelligent, measurable plan, but we will do all of this knowing
that a key part of the process is measurement, analysis and adjustment over time.
One thing you might notice is that a lot of the terms, methods and tactics used in
creating your digital strategy are fundamentally similar to those used in a classic
marketing plan and strategy. There are not a lot of differences to the underlying
approach. The differences come in how the goals and strategies are applied more
than anything. As preparation, you might want to dust off those old marketing text-
books from college if you still have them.
6
9. Overview
This first step of the process sets the foundation for all work to come. Without clear
goals and a clear idea of where you are going, there is no way to truly guide your
efforts towards the most efficient and rewarding end goals.
As stated before in the introduction, your goals here are going to be directly related
to your organizational goals, which will consist of fundraising, membership, aware-
ness and possibly some others. Without knowing where you are headed, there’s lit-
tle chance you can set the strategies, tools, and tactics in place to get there.
Team
The team needed for this portion of the process will include everyone from brand
and marketing strategists to researchers and stakeholders. You will need to involve
not only the technical experts on branding and marketing, but also the subject mat-
ter experts who can help guide your research and findings.
Here is a partial list of the people who you will want to consider involving:
• Digital Strategist
• Brand Expert or Brand Manager
• Marketing Expert
• Research / Focus Group Expert
• Research Assistants
• Stakeholders
• Subject Matter Experts
Components of Identification & Goal-Setting
This stage takes on a few steps and will uncover much of the data and research that
will go into your strategic plans moving forward. We’ve split this into four parts
and will go into further detail on the following pages:
• Initial Research
• Building Blocks
• Additional Research
• Research Summary
A recommendation is to find a good way to store all of the information you gather
in this stage and keep it somewhere that is easy to reference, and easy for others
within your organization to access. Creating a special directory on a shared net-
work drive, or even a folder in a filing cabinet, can make it easy for others in the
future.
While this research is being done specifically for your digital strategy at the mo-
ment, it could serve countless purposes in the future.
The other recommendation is to see what research has already been done by your
organization, which could save you hours of time trying to find answers from
scratch. If you are new to your organization, you might want to ask a few veterans
to see who was in charge of the last set of branding, audience and marketing re-
search so you can assess where things stand before you begin.
Initial Research
The best way to get started, even for the seasoned veteran to your cause or group,
is to do some research. We tend to take for granted that we’re “on the ground” and
have firsthand knowledge. There is a wealth of information out there (or even un-
tapped knowledge within your organization) that can have a dramatic positive im-
pact on your information-gathering process.
8
10. This research can also be helpful to new employees, new consultants or agencies
you begin relationships with, and it can help different departments with your or-
ganization better understand your audiences. First and foremost, it will help guide
the strategies you put into place, and later it will help guide the tactics you choose
to deliver on those strategies.
Your research can be divided into several important components, including:
• Organizational Strategy and Other Documents
You will revisit the content of these items a little bit later in the Building
Blocks portion of this step, but it is important here, too.
• Stakeholder Interviews
Take the time to talk to both internal (staff and board members) and exter-
nal (partners and supporters) stakeholders to determine how the messages
and mediums you are currently using to communicate and market your mis-
sion are resonating and helping these people do their jobs. Having one-on-
one conversations with these people will invariably lead to some great anec-
dotal insights that might not be uncovered otherwise.
• Current Marketing Efforts Audit
We will dive deeper into this in the Building Blocks portion of this step, but
it will help your efforts to do an audit of what current marketing efforts are
being undertaken. We are not yet determining the value of each property
and tactic; we are simply making an audit of what is currently being done
and what has already been invested in.
• Constituent Interviews & Research
This might take the form of in-person interviews, focus groups, online polls
or other such methods. Your goal here is to interview “customers” of the or-
ganization to get a sense of how their needs and expectations are being met
by messaging, marketing and other work the organization is doing.
Primary KPIs
Anyone in the business of measurement will tell you that while there are still many
challenges that present themselves daily, retrieving data has become considerably
easier over time due to products like Google Analytics and the reporting features
available through platforms like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.
That being said, your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not necessarily some-
thing that Google Analytics or your Facebook fan page can easily report on and cor-
relate. KPIs can be defined as measurements of a marketing program’s health or
success, so they are much more high-level than something as granular as the
bounce rate on your website or number of Facebook “likes.” They are also better
rounded and demonstrate the true effectiveness of your marketing and communica-
tions efforts.
Libby Bierman of Sageworks
(http://www.sageworksinc.com/blog/post/2011/06/03/Key-Performance-Indicat
ors-Principles-of-Selection-for-Nonprofits.aspx) gives some advice on some princi-
ples to remember when selecting KPIs:
1. Create a measurement for your KPIs and don’t change it over
time. It is very important that your measurements remain consistent over
time in order to track true progress according to your goals. This also makes
it all the more important to make sure you choose the right metrics and cal-
culations from the start.
2. Set annual targets. Work backwards from a year and determine, if you
have an annual goal of x, what that translates into from a monthly perspec-
tive
3. Use industry benchmarks to help you. While it is great to continue to
beat your own measurements, it is also important to gain the perspective of
how well you are performing alongside other nonprofit organizations. Try to
find like organizations, but don’t be afraid to use NGO-wide industry aver-
ages if you have to.
Dennis R. Mortensen, a Web Analytics Instructor at University of British Colum-
bia, gives seven characteristics of a KPI in his blog post at:
http://visualrevenue.com/blog/2008/02/difference-between-kpi-and-metric.html
9
11. A KPI:
1. Echoes organizational goals.
2. Is decided (or agreed upon) by management.
3. Provides context.
4. Creates meaning on all organizational levels.
5. Is based on legitimate data.
6. Is easy to understand.
7. Leads to action!
To help simplify, or possibly make it more confusing, a KPI is a metric, but a met-
ric is not necessarily a KPI.
Examples: KPIs Versus Metrics
To further help, here are a few examples for you:
Some examples of KPIs:
• Efficiency of your fundraising
• Value of a supporter (donor, volunteer, etc.) over time
• Effectiveness of social media in fundraising
• Conversion rate from advertising
• Value of a social media follower
Some examples of metrics that are not KPIs:
• Website visitors
• Top search keywords
• Twitter follows/unfollows
• YouTube video views
Our suggestions would be to find between five and eight KPIs to focus on. These
will be very important numbers that you and your leadership can all agree contrib-
ute to the overall success of your organization. They also might involve cooperation
between multiple team members, departments or even divisions of your organiza-
tion. For instance, finding the lifetime value of a member or supporter involves
metrics from your digital marketing, fundraising, development, membership and
direct mail teams. Getting all of this data correlated can be a challenge of its own.
Building Blocks
We will go into much more details on these in the next chapter, which was formerly
a white paper of its own. When we talk about the Building Blocks, we mean all the
elements that are taken into account as you’re crafting your strategy, assigning tac-
tics and determining success. This is a mix of goals, strategies and tactics, as you
would imagine. Here is a brief explanation of each; we’ll go into more detail in the
next chapter:
• Organizational Goals
These are the guiding goals and KPIs that everyone in your organization is
working towards. They are not solely digital goals, but your digital efforts
must correlate with them and support them.
• Audiences & Personas
Who are you targeting and what do they value and want from your organiza-
tion and the causes you support? Knowing this will help guide all your ef-
forts and be key in determining what to do and not to do.
10
12. • Digital Landscape
This is a map of where you are in the digital world. It contains all the web
properties and tactics you are involved in and ultimately maps back to audi-
ences and organizational goals, along with the measurements that help you
evaluate successes and failures.
• Technology Infrastructure
This is the supporting technology for all your efforts. For instance, your Cus-
tomer Relationship Management (CRM) that helps you manage members or
collect and send emails, or the Content Management System (CMS) that
powers your website.
• Content Strategy
This is the strategy and plan to ensure that your organization’s content
needs are being handled efficiently, effectively and according to a schedule
that supports both your marketing efforts and your audience’s needs. Every-
thing you do involves some form of content, and the goal here is to get the
maximum benefits from every piece of content you produce.
• Measurements of Success
Critical to all of the above are the measurements that determine how effec-
tively your digital strategy and its associated tactics are working. You will
likely have two sets of measurements at this point: KPIs that are the pri-
mary measurements the organization uses and additional metrics that tell
you how your individual tactics are performing.
Additional Research
There is some additional research that will be most helpful after you do the previ-
ous exercises of both the initial research and identifying the building blocks:
• Audience Research
We wait to do this research until after we define our primary and secondary
audiences because, given finite time and resources, we want to make sure
that we are putting the most effort towards the audiences that will give us
the highest returns. We also encourage doing interviews and/or surveys of
audience members, but this research will consist of outside, independent
research on your key audiences’ online usage habits, their spending and do-
nation habits, and the ways that they prefer to be contacted and interact
with causes and organizations that support them.
• Constituent Interviews
This might take the form of in-person interviews, focus groups, online sur-
veys or other such methods. Your goal here is to interview “customers” of
the organization to get a sense of how their needs and expectations are be-
ing met by messaging, marketing and other work the organization is doing.
• Competitive Research
In the nonprofit world, we don’t typically refer to other organizations as
“competitors,” but it is a harsh reality that we are all competing for some-
thing, whether it’s volunteer time, donation dollars, or even attention to a
key issue. It is important to note what is working and what isn’t amongst
your peers. Even in the for-profit world, there are many examples that you
can draw from of successful outreach and use of technology to solve a prob-
lem or communicate a need.
• General Trends
While your audience is sure to be unique in some ways, it would be foolish
to not take into account general usage trends and behaviors in the digital
world and beyond. Even if your general constituency is “behind the times” it
is still key to your organization’s success to understand general digital
trends. And if you do have a more tech-savvy audience, this is all the more
important to keep up with.
Research Summary
The natural next step is to summarize your research in an easily digestible format
that others within your organization, as well as consultants and agencies you might
work with, can easily read and understand. This invaluable research will form the
basis of the rest of your work, so make sure your summary is exhaustive yet easy
enough to follow that it can be easily referenced and referred to on an ongoing ba-
sis.
11
13. You will be revisiting this research often, and if your summary is well executed,
your organization will be able to use it for many other purposes, including things
like membership information and donation collateral.
12
14. CHAPTER 3
Building
Blocks of
Your Digital
Strategy
“If you can’t describe what you are doing as a
process, you don’t know what you are doing.”
— W. Edwards Deming
15. The process consists of five steps of goal-setting and identification and a sixth step
that outlines a plan to analyze and adjust over time.
In each of the steps, we will focus on tying your goals (organizational or audience-
driven), content and metrics back to results that are easy to define as successful or
not and are directly tied to the success of your organization.
• Building Block 1: Organizational Goals
This is where the process starts and what helps define overall success. We
take your core goals as an organization and better define them as executable
objectives, as well as highlight any dependencies and limitations, to set the
foundation for your digital strategy.
• Building Block 2: Audiences & Personas
Clearly defining your audiences and what their needs and wants are will
help us define what success looks like from your constituents’ perspective.
• Building Block 3: Digital Landscape
This stage outlines the playing field, including the properties you will utilize
and the tactics you will execute to reach your audiences and create conver-
sions.
• Building Block 4: Technology Infrastructure
In order to have a successful digital marketing plan and support for your
digital landscape, the right technology infrastructure is required.
• Building Block 5: Content Strategy
Now that we know who the players are (the audience) and where we are
reaching them (the digital landscape), we will define the types of content
and messaging that will be used to reach them.
• Building Block 6: Defining Success
At this point, we have the data necessary to define what a successful conver-
sion looks like on all of our digital properties and with all of our various digi-
tal marketing tactics. We will then create a measurement plan that incorpo-
rates all of the goals per audience and property and ties them back to the
original organizational goals.
At the end of this process, you will have all the information, from goals to a full
view of your digital landscape, and an exhaustive list of your conversion metrics
that will be used to create your digital strategy.
Building Block 1: Goal-Setting
"There are those who travel and those who are going somewhere.
They are different and yet they are the same. The success has this over
his rivals: He knows where he is going."
— Mark Caine
The first step in the process is to make sure you understand both your organiza-
tional goals and your audience goals. Everything else you do will be dependent on
this step.
Organizational Background
While there is doubtless a lot of information already in existence about your organi-
zation, it’s important to define your organization and its place within your industry
as you begin to build your digital strategy. This goes well beyond your place in the
online world and includes the change in the world that your organization hopes to
achieve. It will undoubtedly include your place in the online world, but—depending
on your business model— properties like your website might simply be a tactic to
achieve a greater goal. On the other hand, if your company’s central presence is on-
line instead of brick and mortar, your Web presence might play a greater role here.
Think big; what is your organization’s mission and vision for the future of your in-
dustry or the cause(s) you support?
14
16. For the purpose of putting your digital strategy together, write one to two para-
graphs that frame your organization’s mission and purpose. This will make it easy
to apply audience goals down the road. Speak to the different types of work you do,
products you offer and so on. You have now set the context for everything that fol-
lows.
Organizational Goals
Your organizational goals are used to form your digital strategy, but they are not
necessarily solely dependent on digital tactics. The purpose of outlining these or-
ganizational goals is to reinforce that each of the goals and tactics used in your digi-
tal strategy should align with at least one of your organizational goals.
As stated in the previous section, your high-level organizational goals are going to
be centered on three things:
1) Increasing revenue
2) Decreasing costs
3) Retaining supporters/donors/volunteers
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
We will be talking a lot more about KPIs throughout this book, but you can start at
this point to determine what your organizational KPIs are. Our suggestion is that
you also create a set of marketing KPIs that, while directly related to organizational
objectives, are also at least close to the sole responsibility of your marketing efforts.
This gives you the responsibility over them and also allows you to claim success
when you are able to move the needle. By no means should you disregard the over-
all organizational KPIs, but in many larger organizations — or even small to
medium-sized ones — it can be hard to tie all the numbers together in a way that
helps you determine the effectiveness of your efforts.
Dependencies
It’s important to define the constraints and dependencies that help define both the
limitations of scope, as well as the approval process, technical infrastructure, and
other organizational initiatives that either provide additional insights or barriers to
the completion and execution of a digital strategy.
Stakeholder and Departmental Goals
There are many stakeholders in an organization’s digital strategy. Some of these
might only be tangentially related, but the success of the plan depends in some part
on the success of the stakeholders and their individual or collective objectives.
Make sure to define any stakeholder goals that are not duplicative of the overall
organizational goals.
Offline Tactics/Campaigns
A digital strategy is always part of a larger communications and marketing plan.
Integrating your digital and traditional efforts requires careful coordination and
15
Digital Strategy
Business
Goals
Advertising &
Marketing
Goals
Technical
Infrastructure
Budgetary
Constraints
Website
Search
Engine
Marketing
Display
Advertising
Traditional
Advertising/
Marketing
Email/Direct
Marketing
Mobile
Social
Media
Blogger
Outreach
17. you will find the most success when the two are aligned. Make sure to note your
offline campaign dependencies. This might be the timing of a direct mail campaign
or telephone fundraising drive, or it might be an annual gala or event.
Budgetary
In a perfect world money would be no object, but your nonprofit organization’s digi-
tal plans are constrained by a budget. This is not simply a dollar amount; it is also
dependent on your fiscal year, monthly cash flow, and even the amount of staff or
volunteer time available. Make sure to provide a well-rounded summary of the
budgetary constraints that will affect the scope of your digital strategy.
Technical Infrastructure
Technical infrastructure can be a large investment for an organization, and any de-
pendencies here might include server software requirements, legacy CMS or CRM
systems, or skill preferences of existing staff. This helps set the stage for budgetary
needs as well as the scope of specific tactics like a website redesign. Make sure to
differentiate between required items (e.g. your organization signed a five-year con-
tract with a CRM vendor) and those that are simply a preference (e.g. your IT team
prefers open source technology).
Challenges
In addition to dependencies, outline some challenges that pertain to achieving your
goals. These could be based on previous marketing efforts or other external factors.
Try not to be too audience-specific and focus more on organizational challenges.
We will get to audience-specific challenges in the next step.
What to Do:
In the Appendix of this document, there is a worksheet in Step 1 that helps you
identify these elements.
Goal Name Description Dependencies Challenges
PrimaryPrimaryPrimaryPrimary
G1:
SecondarySecondarySecondarySecondary
G2:
G3:
Recap and Next Steps
At this point in the process, we can already see what we would like to accomplish
and how we can start making a plan to achieve it — simply based on overall goals,
dependencies and challenges. We don’t need to get very specific in our recommen-
dations at this point, but we should have a good sense of our overall expectations
and limitations. In the next step, you will think more about your primary and sec-
ondary audiences and your goals for each.
16
18. Building Block 2: Audiences & Personas
“To create a product that must satisfy a diverse audience of users,
logic might tell you to make it as broad in its functionality as possible
to accommodate the most people. This logic, however, is flawed. The
best way to successfully accommodate a variety of users is to design
for specific types of individuals with specific needs.”
— Cooper, Reiman, Cronin, About Face 3: The Essentials of
Interaction Design
In this step, we will be defining primary and secondary audiences and what their
purpose of interacting with your organization is, as well as what your definition of
a conversion or goal for that audience is from your organization’s perspective.
For instance, a primarily fundraising-based or-
ganization could have two primary audiences:
1) high-value donors, and 2) grassroots (low-
dollar, high-volume) donors. Each audience
obviously has very unique needs and might be
motivated by different calls to action. For in-
stance, a conversion for the high-value donors
might end with a phone call to your develop-
ment department rather than a credit card do-
nation. As you define your audiences, be sure
to keep in mind how you will begin to track
them and measure your success.
Personas are a very useful part of a website redesign process as well and have been
a staple of user experience (UX) professionals for years. In this step, we are going
to create a hybrid of the type of audience profile that you might use to develop a
marketing plan and a persona that you would use to create use cases for a website.
As a rule of thumb, try to create three primary personas (designated as “A” audi-
ences) and two to three secondary personas (“B” audiences). You might include
more audiences, which is fine, but keep in mind that the more audiences you have
the more planning and resources you will need to market, track and convert.
What to Do:
In the worksheet for audiences in the Appendix, we list the following categories
that should be filled out for this step:
• Primary Audiences
o Name
o Description
o Needs
o Wants
• Secondary Audiences
o Name
o Description
o Needs
o Wants
Then, we tie each audience to their specific goals and your organizational goals,
along with the metric you can use to measure them. It is also important to define
any challenges that you may have in measuring this. For instance, if one depart-
ment keeps high-value donation amounts tracked in a separate CRM or database
from lower-value website donations, you might have to work to correlate the two,
or you might need access to both in order to track both audiences.
17
19. Audience
Name
Your Goals
Audience-Specific |
Organizational
Your Goals
Audience-Specific |
Organizational
Measurement
Metric
Challenges
A1: A1G1: G1 MM1:
A2: A2G1: G2 MM3:
A3: A3G1: G3 MM4:
Recap and Next Steps
While you already knew your audiences for your digital marketing efforts, this step
should have clarified what they want, how to reach them, and how you can track
the effectiveness of your efforts.
In the next step, we are going to take a look at the entirety of your digital landscape
so you can begin to tie the various communication outlets to your primary and sec-
ondary audiences, all while adhering to your overall organizational goals.
Building Block 3: Digital Landscape
“We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even
thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.”
—Lawrence Durrell
Your digital landscape is your organization’s comprehensive presence on the Web
— from websites, microsites and mobile apps to social media presences and be-
yond. At this point, it is important that we get the lay of the land so you can begin
18
Organizational
Website
Social Media
Digital
Advertising
Campaigns
Traditional
Marketing,
Advertising,
PR
Event
Marketing
Provides
Content
Drives
Traffic
Drives
Traffic
Drives
Traffic
Drives
Traffic
Facebook
Twitter
Google+
YouTube
Search
Engine
PPC
Social
Media
PPC
Digital
Display
Ads
Email/Direct
Marketing
Provides
Content
20. to better understand how your organizational and audience goals can be achieved
by strategic use of all your properties. We recommend creating a diagram similar
to the one on the previous page that shows where your brand exists online. Be ex-
haustive in your listing and determine the flow of traffic and content to and from
each touch point.
We are going to make the distinction here between properties and tactics. Essen-
tially, your properties are virtual presences that you own or manage and that can
be linked to for an extended period of time. Tactics refer to timely things that don’t
necessarily have a permanent “home” on the Web, such as email campaigns, adver-
tisements, or events, which may only exist for a short period of time and generally
send traffic to other destinations or properties.
Properties
Your digital properties include websites and other destinations like a social media
presence. Most likely these are places on the Web that your organization has con-
trol over from a content and branding perspective, though sometimes you may
have limited control (e.g. partner websites). In order to distinguish between those
that you have full control versus partial control, make a list and differentiate be-
tween the two using a term such as internal and external, or something similar.
Tactics
Tactics are similar to your digital properties except that they do not have a static
destination where they exist like a website has a URL that is consistent over time.
Examples would be an email campaign, digital display ads or public relations ef-
forts. These are very important to your marketing efforts, but tactics such as digital
display ads might only run for a short period of time, across many different web-
sites, and thus cannot be referenced by a single location.
While your tactics might behave differently than your digital properties in a num-
ber of ways, they can be simplified down to having similar characteristics as your
properties, such as:
• Target Audiences
• Goals
o Audience-Specific
o Organizational
Enumerating your tactics the same way you list your Web properties will help with
the next step, which will be your content strategy. This also forms a comprehensive
view of the touch points you have with your audiences.
Conversion Metrics
The next step is to define what successful use of each of these properties or tactics
will result in. We call this a conversion. Some common conversion metrics might
be:
• Successful completion of a donation
• Signing up for an email list
• Sharing content on Facebook
• Signing a petition
• Registering for an event
19
21. • Clicking on an advertisement, going to a campaign landing page, then clicking a
learn more button
We want to define each of these conversion events so that we can set the measure-
ments in place in order to determine the effectiveness of our efforts. For instance, a
conversion pathway might be something like the workflow to the right.
Thus, we want to make sure that we add “successful donation” to our list of conver-
sion metrics for both advertising and the website. We will then tie these both to our
audience and organizational goals from earlier, and we will go on in the next steps
to tie these to a measurement plan to report on the effectiveness of our donation
pathway.
We will also return to this idea of a multi-step process, or funnel, later in this docu-
ment. Note how, while there is only one measure of success (a completed dona-
tion), there are several steps in this donation process as described above. We will
want to define such pathways in Step 5, where we talk about measuring our suc-
cess.
What to Do:
In the Appendix, there is a table that addresses your digital landscape and looks
like the table that follows this paragraph. You can see that we are now making sure
to add the properties/tactics into our process and tie them back to both organiza-
tional and audience-specific goals. At each step in the process it’s important to do
this, as it clearly defines the relationship between everything you do and the way
that it can be measured, as well as the way that it contributes to the goals of your
organization.
The table below shows how this can be organized:
Property/Tactic Audiences Drives
Traffic to:
Goals Addressed:
Audience-Specific
| Organizational
Goals Addressed:
Audience-Specific
| Organizational
Receives
Traffic
from:
Provides
Content for:
Conversion
Metric
Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)Internal (organization-managed)
External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)External (not managed by organization)
Recap and Next Steps
Now that we have outlined all of the properties and tactics you are using in your
digital marketing and the conversion methods they employ, we can trace back-
wards through our process to see the audiences that they reach and the audience
and organizational goals they support. We are halfway finished with the work of
enumerating the breadth and depth of your digital strategy.
In the next section, we will talk about your technology infrastructure. This is what
supports all of your efforts from communication to Web properties. Your technol-
ogy infrastructure is an important consideration for your digital strategy because it
can set the scope for many of your tactics.
20
22. Building Block 4: Technology Infrastructure
“Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will
tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's
hardware section will tell you the problem is.”
—Dave Barry, Claw Your Way to the Top
Overview
Your technology infrastructure supports both external and internal communica-
tions — including your digital marketing properties and tactics, as well internal
functions such as email, document storage and more. Because this book is primar-
ily targeted to marketing professionals, not technology professionals, the content
will only touch on the basics of the requirements for a proper technology infrastruc-
ture.
There are many factors that go into these technology decisions, but it is important
that the digital marketing team understands the pieces and how they relate to real-
izing marketing goals, connecting with audiences, and providing measurements of
success.
Your Current Technology Infrastructure
Your organization’s technology infrastructure can be divided into several
components:
• External
o Website
• Content Management System
• Web Hosting
o Customer Relationship Management (CRM) / Membership
Management
• Membership
• Fundraising
• Communication (email)
o Marketing & Advertising
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Marketing
• Internal
o Email
o Document Storage & Sharing
o Software
21
Technical
Infrastructure
CRM
InternalWebsite
Content
Management
System
Advocacy Fundraising
Communication
(e.g. Email)
Hosting Communication Productivity
Software File sharing
OperationsIntranet
23. Recap and Next Steps
Now that we have outlined all of the components of your technology infrastructure,
you can begin to assess the effectiveness of each, how they support your digital mar-
keting efforts, and then make decisions that can decrease cost and increase the effi-
ciency and effectiveness of your organization’s efforts.
In the next section, we’ll cover content. Content can be text, images, video, as well
as social media posts and other user-contributed items. Just like we defined all of
our Web properties and tactics, we’ll do the same with the content we produce.
Building Block 5: Content Strategy
“Without a content strategist, who will objectively assess the efficacy
of current content against brand strategy and communication goals?
Who will audit existing content for quality, currency, and relevance?
Who will create key messages and develop content to support user
decisions along the way? We haven’t even gotten to writing yet!”
— Margot Bloomstein, The Case for Content Strategy Motown Style
Content is a large component of any digital strategy because while your digital land-
scape is where you are reaching your audience(s), your content is how your organi-
zation is communicating. Even if you are not an organization whose primary offer-
ing is content (such as a magazine or blog site), content still plays a huge role in
your communications.
The idea behind your content strategy is to communicate:
• Effectively: Produce the right content for the right audience.
• Efficiently: Organize and produce content in a way that reduces redun-
dancy and allows all of the departments and channels of your organization
to easily create communications.
• Appropriately: Use the right tools to communicate with the right people.
22
Content Strategy
Message
Mission
Tone/
Voice
Types of
Output
Audience
Primary Secondary
Delivery
Primary
Website
Related
Sites
Social
Media
SEM Advertising
Public
Relations
Timing
Editorial
Calendar
Release
of Other
Content
Media
Releases
24. Message
Mission/Vision
The mission/vision should align with your organization’s branding guidelines and
overall goals.
Tone
Tone refers to the personality and attitude in your writing. Generally, you want to
have consistency across your brand so that all audiences share a common experi-
ence, but there are times when a different approach or voice resonates more with
one audience over another.
Types of Output
This refers to the different types of content being written. This doesn’t refer to
something as general as text on the website but more specifically to things like or-
ganizational description, case studies, blog posts, press releases, team bios, status
posts and other pieces of content that are unique in their subject and purpose.
Audiences
Your audiences were defined in Building Block 2. The important thing here is to
ensure that you tie each type of content to one of your primary or secondary audi-
ences.
Delivery
Properties and tactics were defined in Building Block 3. The purpose of including
them in your content strategy is to make the connection between where your con-
tent resides, what audiences it is connected to, and what goals it addresses.
Timing
Editorial Calendar
Your organization’s editorial calendar is the schedule by which content and infor-
mation is released. This should include both a time and topic-based breakdown.
Simply saying that blogs will be written twice a week doesn’t adequately convey the
direction of the content that is being produced by your organization. Most likely, if
you have a digital editorial calendar, it will be based somewhat on a broader organ-
izational one —which is a good thing. Just as your digital tactics relate to your tradi-
tional tactics, the content you prepare for your digital properties must support and
augment content produced for your other efforts.
Media Relations
Your content strategy needs to incorporate ties to your organization’s media rela-
tions efforts. This could be making sure that blog content pertaining to recent press
releases is readily available, posting statuses on social media announcing releases,
or simply just ensuring press releases are available on your website.
Content Review
How often does the content need to be reviewed for accuracy, timeliness and align-
ment with what is currently happening at the organization? For a website, descrip-
tions of key focus areas and case studies need to be either reviewed or rewritten
every six months or so. For social media content, this is not necessarily about sin-
gle posts but more about the focus of the content.
What to Do:
In the Appendix, there is a table to fill out for the Content Strategy section.
Outputs Audiences Properties/
Tactics
Goals
Addressed:
Audience-
Specific |
Organizational
Timing: Review Cycle
23
25. Recap and Next Steps
Your organization’s content strategy is critical to understand because it can be used
to effectively support all of your marketing efforts and augment the work you are
doing across your digital landscape. By defining the content that you are creating
and managing and defining the audiences and goals it supports, you now have an
important trifecta of your digital strategy covered:
• Audiences and their goals
• Digital properties and tactics
• Content strategy
Next, we’re going to go through all of the previous steps to create a measurable
plan that will show the effectiveness of your website and digital marketing tactics
for each of your primary and secondary audiences. This will be the last piece in the
preparation of your digital strategy before the rest of your work begins.
Building Block 6: Measurements of Success
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that
counts can be counted."
— Albert Einstein
Overview
There are many components to success for your digital strategy. The purpose of
defining success is to enumerate the properties and tactics, audiences, audience
goals and organizational goals and align them with conversion metrics and a plan/
tools for measurement.
Don’t confuse these with the KPIs you’re defining and aligning your overall digital
strategy with. These metrics of success will get a little more granular than a KPI
but will still help you measure the success of individual tactics. If you have chosen
your KPIs carefully, all of these measurements will help you determine your suc-
cess against your KPIs at a later time.
You’ll be taking the goals and measurements you created in Building Block 3: Digi-
tal Landscape and augmenting it with a plan to measure each item. This completes
the process we began in Building Block 1. We have aligned organizational goals
with audiences and audience-specific goals. We have then deconstructed our entire
digital landscape by Web property or marketing tactic. We have created a plan to
populate all of these properties with content targeted at specific audiences to
achieve specific goals. And finally, below, we outline our plan to measure the effec-
tiveness of our work.
Unfortunately, as the quote above from Mr. Einstein suggests, there are some
things that we wish we could measure that are more difficult than others, and some-
times things that are easy to measure are less meaningful to us in the long run. In
Neil Mason’s article, “5 Quotes for Analytics Success,” he elaborates on this by say-
ing that there is a real challenge in creating KPIs because, though there are a lot of
points we can measure, it is important that we stay focused on the measurements
24
26. that help us most in achieving our goals. We need to remember that in most cases,
even though something can be measured, there is a cost associated with it of time,
money or both. Thus, we must carefully select our conversion metrics.
Finally, while it’s important to measure as much as you can, it is more important to
measure the things that are the most meaningful in relation to getting your audi-
ence(s) to complete transactions that are critical to your organization. This could
be registering for a membership, making a donation, volunteering, or attending an
event. We will want to take a look at how individual goals relate to steps in a proc-
ess (or a funnel) and then how these individual funnels relate to a customer or con-
stituent lifecycle.
Measurement
What Should You Measure?
In his blog post, “100 Ways to Measure Social Media,” David Berkowitz outlines
100 different metrics that can be used to measure social media alone. Fortunately,
he also emphasizes that, while these are important things to measure, you need to
first start with a plan of why you are measuring them and what you hope to
achieve with the measurement.
Now, imagine what this list would look like if we also added all of the metrics re-
lated to your website, your digital advertising, and your search engine optimization
— not to mention your offline tactics.
You want a list of metrics that is exhaustive enough to measure the effectiveness of
your tactics and yet not so many that you are unable to focus. If you have too many
goals, it will be next to impossible to make anything a true priority.
Conversion Metrics
Be careful when determining what your conversions are and what it means to your
organization. For instance, conversions could be things such as:
• Donations
• Volunteer applications
• Email list signup
More likely than not, there is a series of steps that a user goes through to complete
one of these conversions. A donation, for instance, might require:
• A user lands on a page to decide what type of donation they want to give.
• A user fills out payment information.
• The user is taken to a success page.
This process is something that can be tracked using goal tracking in software such
as Google Analytics. By tracking and enumerating the steps in the process, you can
determine where users are arriving at your page from, what steps in the process are
effective, and how many users make it all the way through the process. The goal of
tracking conversions is to optimize the pathway for each audience in order to maxi-
mize your results, in this case, donations received.
25
Discover Evaluate Use Convert Engage
Website
Visit
Download
Info
Repeat
Website
Visit
Donation
"Funnel"
Social Media
Sharing,
Donation,
Referral
Choose
Confirm
Donate
Step in Customer
Lifecycle
Measurement Metric
Step in a Conversion
Funnel
27. Measurement Plan/Tools
Outline your plan to measure the conversion metrics as well as the tools you will
use to track results. This goes back to your digital landscape exercise where each
audience had its own measurable goals and a conversion metric assigned to it.
Many times, your measurement plan will be something simple since it is some-
thing your Web analytics (e.g. Google Analytics) platform measures out of the box.
Other times it might be more difficult to measure and will involve cooperation
from different departments. For instance, to track event attendance and cross-
reference that with Web advertising reach, you might have to coordinate with sev-
eral different teams and work across data sets. Or, if your CRM tracks donation
data or email signups in a separate database from the one in which your website
visitors are measured, you might have to use an analysis tool to analyze the results
of a fundraising drive.
The following table is included in the Appendix to help you create this.
Property/Tactic Audiences Goals Addressed:
Audience-
Specific |
Organizational
Goals Addressed:
Audience-
Specific |
Organizational
Conversion
Metric
Measurement Plan
What is Your Funnel?
Anyone familiar with Google Analytics’ Goal Tracking will at least understand the
basics of a funnel. The idea is that a multi-step process, such as purchasing a prod-
uct on an e-commerce site, might have several steps and all must occur in a specific
order for a goal to be met. An example of a funnel is:
1. Identify the product you want.
2. Add the product to your shopping cart.
3. Click the checkout button.
4. Create an account.
5. Add billing information.
6. Confirm your order.
7. Complete the transaction.
That’s a lot of steps, and a lot of opportunities for a user to
drop out of the funnel. One important thing to track is where
your users drop off in the funnel, and to make positive
changes (try A/B testing to test the effectiveness of changes
you make) in order to decrease the drop-off from one step to
the next.
An example of a funnel for a fundraising-based nonprofit
might be:
1. User lands on a donation page.
2. User chooses the type of donation they want to make
(e.g. one-time donation).
3. User fills out contact and billing information.
4. User hits a submit button.
This is a simple example. But the important thing for your digital strategy is to
make this single example of a funnel into a larger constituent lifecycle.
Web
Advertisement
Campaign
Landing Page
Donation Form
Billing
Information
Success Page!
26
28. You can define a funnel in a table like the following:
One-Time Donation Funnel
Step Description Location Measurement
Metric
1 – Donation
Page Visit
User lands on
the donation
page
index.html (Home page) Page visit
2 – Chooses
Donation Type
User selects
donation type
donation.html (Donation page) Page visit
Etc. -- -- --
Customer Lifecycle
Think of a customer lifecycle as several funnels combined back-to-back or in some
recurring frequency. It could be something like this:
1. A user becomes a follower on social media and learns about your cause.
2. A user donates (this encapsulates the entire funnel for the donation example
above).
3. A user is added to the email supporter list.
4. A user might donate again, or volunteer to help the organization.
Recap
This step was the last part of the setup work required to create your digital strat-
egy, and — combined with the research work you have done — will serve as the ba-
sis for everything ahead. Now the real strategic work begins. You will take all that
you have learned from these building blocks and create your digital strategy.
27
29. 1
2
3
4
CHAPTER 4
Planning &
Creation
“Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of
all work is production or accomplishment and to either of
these ends there must be forethought, system, planning,
intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration.
Seeming to do is not doing.”
- Thomas Edison
30. Overview
You should feel a sense of accomplishment by this point in the process. That first
step comprises a lot of research, a lot of data compilation, and a lot of mapping
your current tactics and properties to organizational goals. It doesn’t necessarily
get easier from here on out, but a lot of the hard work of defining where you cur-
rently are as an organization is now done, and you can move to what we consider
the fun part of planning your strategy.
Additive/Subtractive Process
At (or quite possibly before) this point in the process, you might be asking yourself
one of two important questions:
1. What do I do if I have already invested a lot of time and money into some
strategies, properties and tactics that do not seem to align with my organiza-
tional goals?
2. What do I do if I am working with a new or very young organization that
does not have a lot of properties and tactics in place? Where do I start when
my audit of existing properties does not turn up very much?
A Lesson from Color Theory
There are two different ways to create colors, depending on which medium (analog
or digital) you are using.
Janet Lynn Ford (http://www.worqx.com/color/color_systems.htm) explains sub-
tractive and additive color like this:
Subtractive Color. When we mix colors using paint, or through the print-
ing process, we are using the subtractive color method. Subtractive color
mixing means that one begins with white and ends with black; as one adds
color, the result gets darker and tends to black.
Additive Color. If we are working on a computer, the colors we see on the
screen are created with light using the additive color method. Additive color
mixing begins with black and ends with white; as more color is added, the
result is lighter and tends to white.
How this Applies to Digital Strategy
In answer to those two potential questions above, think of there being two unique
approaches to your digital strategy, and then think about which one will work the
best for you.
If you are at a new or young organization, or if a completely new approach is
needed, you are looking at an additive approach to your digital strategy. Start with
a clean slate and build only the right pieces that make sense for your goals and audi-
ences. We highly recommend that any organization do this if they have not gone
through a digital strategy process before, even if most of the properties and tactics
currently being used end up being worked back into to the strategy.
Do you already have 90% of the right properties and tactics in place and are achiev-
ing most of your goals? Have you recently done a digital strategy audit (in the last
one or two years)? If so, perhaps you want to think from a subtractive standpoint.
Take a look at each property and tactic, along with how they align with organiza-
tional goals, and reduce or modify what you are doing.
Team
You are going to need a core team of decision-makers to define your strategy, and
then a full marketing, creative and technical team to help create the plan based on
your digital strategy.
Make sure you don’t have too many cooks in the kitchen during the “Define the
Strategy” portion of this. You need a few key people that can make executive deci-
sions about what is truly important and what might need to go or be lessened in
scope.
29
31. Define the Strategy
With all of the research and a full audit of your existing digital marketing and tech-
nology landscape in front of you, it is finally time to define your digital strategy.
There are five key pieces to this:
1. Organizational Goals and Marketing Objectives
What are the key goals that you as an organization are tasked with achieving?
This could be awareness of an issue, online fundraising or many other things.
Try not to limit your thinking to departmental goals or more tactical goals. For
instance “getting more Facebook fans” is not an organizational goal. “Creating
awareness of our cause” is a goal, and Facebook fans might be a possible tactic
used to achieve this.
2. Primary and Secondary Audiences
By defining your primary and secondary audiences, you will be able to give a
weight to the various tactics you use as part of your digital strategy. It is impor-
tant not to lump every audience as primary, simply because you will need to focus
your efforts on achieving the goals that are most important to the health and vital-
ity of the organization. While all audiences are important, some are more closely
aligned with the continued success of your organization than others.
3. Trends and Best Practices
You don’t always need to follow them and they don’t always apply to what you
are doing, but in this business, you need to understand the latest trends and
best practices if you are going to continue to innovate. Keep tabs both on what
your peer organizations are doing as well as trendsetters in the for-profit space.
Don’t simply mimic, as duplicate results are unlikely to happen to any two or-
ganizations doing the exact same thing, but make sure that you are following
user behaviors and marketing trends and be critical of what you see. Take the
good (and relevant) pieces for yourself and leave the others for someone else.
4. Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Before this step in the process; you should already have a good sense of what
your organizational and marketing KPIs are. Determine four to eight key met-
rics that will determine the success of your digital strategy in achieving organ-
izational goals. It is tempting to lump a lot of metrics into this list, but at the
end of the day, you can tell more from an in-depth analysis of a few things than
you can from a cursory analysis of many. A good rule of thumb is to include a
mix of leading (metrics signaling future events) and lagging (metrics indicating
a past event) indicators in your KPIs. As Chris Iafolla says in his article “Social
Media ROI: Uncovering a Combination of Leading and Lagging Indicators”
(http://prforpharma.com/2011/03/23/social-media-roi-uncovering-a-combina
tion-of-leading-and-lagging-indicators/):
“ROI is a great measurement, and one that shouldn’t be discarded—but it also
shouldn’t be the sole measure of performance. If ROI is the only measure you
are using to judge the performance of your social media efforts, how do you
know mid-stream that something isn’t working? How do you adjust your strate-
gies and tactics when it becomes evident that something isn’t working? The an-
swer is simple—you can’t. Measuring only ROI gives a good indication on suc-
cess or failure. But it doesn’t allow you to change course before a problem de-
rails your entire social media effort.”
5. Define Your Digital Properties and Tactics
In the previous step we did a full audit of your properties and tactics. Now it’s
time to take a fresh look at them and determine which fit and which don’t. This
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32. is not always easy, especially for you digital hoarders out there. If your organiza-
tion is still on MySpace, for instance, you might fall into this category. Or, it
could be something less obvious than a social network that has passed its
prime. For instance, why are you on Facebook and Twitter? If the answer is “be-
cause we need to be,” or “because everyone else is,” or even “because our audi-
ence is,” you might be missing the point.
Unless you have something valuable to share and a compelling reason for shar-
ing it on a platform, you need to rethink why you are using it. There was a time
when everyone supposedly NEEDED a blog, but few really understood the
power and usefulness of it. Those that learned to use blogs successfully as a way
to reach audiences through powerful content most likely have a much more so-
phisticated blogging plan and strategy than those organizations who were just
going through the motions.
Also, keep in mind that your audience is smart. They can tell when you are just
going through the motions. The positive side is that they also reward those who
provide meaningful content, interactions and methods to allow them to support
the causes and organizations they care about.
You and your team will no doubt have several good discussions around these
points above, and a good document that summarizes your mutual understanding is
not only key to your success but will serve as the primary record of your digital
strategy work.
So does that mean your digital strategy is complete at this point? Unfortunately,
there’s just one thing missing now: the actual digital strategy, defined. We will now
take what you have researched and defined and create strategies for each of your
goals. Sometimes a single strategy will work to achieve a goal, but more likely you
will have several concurrent strategies in place to accomplish them.
An Example Digital Strategy
Let’s go through a very basic example just to give you an idea of how to proceed
with this:
A new fundraising organization whose primary cause revolves around a children’s
education issue needs to create a platform to raise a large amount of grassroots do-
nations. The cause is not controversial, but awareness is low because the organiza-
tion is new and there has not been much advocacy work for this cause in the past.
Our goal for this fictional strategy is threefold:
1. Create an efficient fundraising program that is sustainable by the organiza-
tion.
2. Do it in as short an amount of time as possible.
3. Reach a large audience and retain them as supporters.
Let’s examine some sample strategies for this organization:
1. Set up easy donation mechanisms that illustrate where the money is going
to and how it is being used. This is really a no-brainer, but for a new organi-
zation, it’s going to be necessary. For tactics to support this strategy, make
sure you reach your audiences through the website, social media (e.g. Face-
book Causes, etc.) and mobile (e.g. text to donate or a mobile-friendly dona-
tion page on your website). Measurement of this strategy is pretty simple: a)
how many donations were received, b) what was the amount of donations
received, c) what was the cost of acquiring those donations.
2. Now, let’s get a little more targeted. Let’s think about who our audiences for
this fictional organization and cause might be. Let’s craft a strategy that tar-
gets parents of these children. We can frame this strategy like so:
Target parents of the children affected by this cause through a membership/
partner program that creates advocates for the organization, shares the in-
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33. formation with fellow parents and teachers, and allows the organization a
direct communication channel with an important constituency.
Tactics to support this strategy might include a members section on your
website, an email newsletter, online information sessions, social media
groups and more.
Measurement of this strategy might include a) the growth of time of this
membership group, b) the lifetime value of a member determined through
donations, volunteerism and social spread of your message, and c) activity
of the membership network in general and how it relates to the growth of
your organization.
What you’ll notice about these two sample strategies is that they are very simple.
Most likely, your organization has some more complex needs. Hopefully you will
also notice that both of these strategies address at least one of the primary goals,
which make it easy to create tactics and measurement plans.
What You Should Create As Part of this Step
You should walk away from this part of Step 2 with a document that is structured
like the following:
1. Overview
2. Organizational Goals & KPIs
3. Audiences
4. Recommendations and Rationale
5. Digital Strategy
6. KPIs of the Digital Strategy
7. Tactics
Strategies & Tactics: Peeling the Onion
Keep in mind as you are on the tactics portion of this document that some of your
tactics might require strategies of their own. For instance, your digital strategy will
dictate why, how and with what measurable results you gauge the success of your
email marketing efforts. In order for the email program to be effective, however,
you will need to create and finalize your email marketing strategy.
There are many different ways to approach this idea, but the way we have always
approached it is to use the analogy of the onion. In his novel “Foucault’s Pendu-
lum,” Italian author Umberto Eco writes: “The universe is peeled like an onion. An
onion is all peel.” While Mr. Eco was pondering a slightly more existential problem
than your Facebook marketing strategy, you can think of your efforts as an onion —
layer upon layer of strategy and tactics that all connect back to your high-level or-
ganizational goals and KPIs.
Creating the Plan
Brainstorm
With your digital strategy defined, it’s time to assemble the troops and figure out
how to execute this new plan. A brainstorming session, or series of sessions, can
help get people out of the ruts of doing what they are used to doing.
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34. Defining and Aligning Tactics with Your Strategy
After your brainstorms, it’s time to fact-check. Your team undoubtedly had some
great ideas during your sessions, but do they all align with your strategy? It’s best
to have one to two people go back through and make sure that the ideas you’ve
shared are not only new and innovative but are going to put you on a path to achiev-
ing your goals.
If it helps, make a spreadsheet that clearly aligns strategies with tactics, similar to
the tables we looked at during the Building Blocks phase.
The final test is measurement. If you are suggesting a tactic within your digital
strategy and its measurements do not somehow point back to KPIs and organiza-
tional goals, you need to make sure that it is worth doing.
It Takes a Village … or at Least a Really Good Team
Even though you might have a team member or role within your organization that
has the title of Digital Strategist, make no mistake, it takes a team to create, imple-
ment, execute and measure a digital strategy.
• Creative
• Content
• Technical
• Marketing & Advertising
• Organizational
• Measurement
Organizational Buy-In
There is one final piece to your digital strategy — organizational buy-in. You need
not only your boss to give you the full support (both time and budget) to execute
your plan, but also the support of the many other people in your organization that
this plan touches. To think there is a single person in your organization that it
doesn’t touch is also a false assumption. Even at a very highlevel, success (or lack
thereof) means changes in budgets, resources and even the creation of new initia-
tives and access to new funding sources.
One way to secure organizational buy-in is to provide your fellow employees access
to parts of the process. Without resorting to design by committee, having a few up-
dates at an organizational meeting or retreat might be a good way to get people ex-
cited about new changes coming to the way you connect with your constituents
through digital marketing. It might also be a way to solicit some informal feedback
that can be helpful as you are putting your final plans together.
Once you have a final plan put together, have someone from your team present it
to the organization with an emphasis on how this new strategy affects everyone in
a positive way.
Future-Proofing Your Plan
After going through the effort to create your plan, the last thing you want is for it to
be upset by a new development in either your industry or the digital media indus-
try as a whole. How do you ensure that the digital strategy you create today will
stand the test of time? There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this impor-
tant issue:
• You Can’t Predict the Future, But Many People Try
Do your best to stay on top of industry trends, whether it means reading non-
profit forums such as those at NTEN.org, or technology blogs like Mashable,
or marketing resources such as iMedia Connection. There are plenty of
voices, insights and opinions out there and while you can’t read every single
article, you can keep your ear to the ground for what trends are exploding
and which might fizzle out in a few weeks. Find trusted sources, follow
them, converse with them, and ask questions when you can. The insights
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35. you gain from this behavior may lead to adjustments or modifications in
your plans.
• Stick to Your Goals
No new social network’s launch is worth scrapping your digital strategy over
— not even something with such strong growth as Pinterest (at least at the
time of writing this — by now it might either have been acquired, gone bank-
rupt, brought about the apocalypse, or none of the above). Stick to your
goals, and even if you don’t get to play with the latest tools right away, you
will be happy you focused when it comes time to report on your successes.
Your Plan Is Made to be Adjusted
The caveat to the second point above is that this entire process is intended to be an
ever-evolving one. While top-level organizational goals or even marketing KPIs
might not change often, you will need to be relied upon to make necessary adjust-
ments to account for all types of things. Some of these things might include new
technologies, tactics or other things that pop into existence between the time you
plan and the time you’ve executed.
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37. Overview
As we stated before, historically, a digital strategy was a more monolithic task with
a long lead-time and period of implementation that was harder to course-correct if
changes needed to be made. With easier access to analytics and even A/B or multi-
variate testing, it is now a recommended approach to create a plan that is quicker
to implement and easier to change in the long term.
According to Thomas Davenport of the Harvard Business Review:
“The advantage of this approach is that in the long run, it tends to be more
successful in delivering business results, because each step is measured and
adjusted for. In addition, it tends to favor smaller (less risky, less expensive)
steps rather than larger (more risky, more expensive) initiatives before get-
ting the payback.”
It is not the purpose of this book to go into minute detail about how to execute a
marketing campaign, issue a website Request for Proposal (RFP), or other activi-
ties like those. We also won’t go into the how-tos of choosing a particular technol-
ogy platform, or why or when to replace them.
However, there are several issues to keep in mind when executing your strategy
that we can go over at a high level. A few of the top ones are:
• Budget
What are your initial budget and annual budget that you have to create, sup-
port and upgrade any programs you put in place?
• Team
What team members do you have in place to implement your plan and what
are their strengths and weaknesses? Do you have plans to bring in an out-
side agency or contractors to help with areas where you don’t have internal
expertise? What does that arrangement look like? Is it project-based or re-
tainer?
• Timing
How does your plan correspond with other organizational milestones and
calendar events? Do you have enough hours in the day to not only imple-
ment the plan for the first time but to execute it on a long-term basis?
We’ll talk about all of these a little below. The important thing for you to remember
is that during the process of implementation, there will be many times and chances
for you to change or compromise your plan. While we can make errors and omis-
sions in our plans on occasion, be careful that any changes, course corrections or
compromises do not undo the planning and strategy work you put so much effort,
research and thinking into. It can be so easy to make a minor change that undoes
hours of research and brainstorming, but be very careful and trust your and your
team’s instincts when you get to this stage.
Budget
Let’s get this one out of the way first. It is often the one you have the least flexibility
with, and as a nonprofit organization, it can be the most challenging. Between the
budget and team/timing, it is often the former that cannot be changed, while the
latter two we can get around by recruiting volunteers or simply working more
hours in a day.
Many times you will have input into next fiscal year’s budget, but depending on
many factors (donations for the year, corporate giving, etc.) you can still be con-
strained. You will also want to be very realistic about this item since it is, again, the
one that is least easy to modify once it is set.
If you are having internal challenges getting sign-off on a larger budget or even an
appropriate budget for the digital strategy work that needs to be done, consider pro-
36
38. posing a performance-based budget to the decision-makers at your organization.
For instance, if you can increase either the amount or efficiency of fundraising ef-
forts, you ask for a corresponding increase in budget for the next year.
If you have access to regression analysis, you can even do some forecasting and pro-
pose that, based on your past performance, if you put twice the budget into your
digital strategy efforts, you will get an x times return on the investment.
Team
You are going to need a full team to execute this portion. This is where having an
agency with a full staff of creative, technical, marketing and communications pro-
fessionals comes in very handy. If you don’t have this, or access to it, you and your
team members are going to have to wear a number of hats.
Many times you will issue an RFP to get the resources and help you need. How-
ever, if you find yourself in a situation where much of the work will be done inter-
nally, it is still a good idea to treat your process in a similar enough way that takes
into account all available resources and how the implementation of your digital
strategy will impact their normal work routines and tasks.
Your team will include the following:
• Digital Strategist
This person will guide the process from a strategic standpoint and make
sure the digital strategy is being followed.
• Marketing Strategist
This person will help to ensure measurements and marketing goals are be-
ing set up and followed.
• Marketing Team
This team will support the Marketing Strategist and implement the various
marketing tactics in the plan.
• Communications Team
This team will also support the Marketing Strategist and implement the com-
munication schedule and tactics in the plan.
• Creative Director
This person will ensure the branding standards of the organization are fol-
lowed and that the pieces of the plan are unified in look, character and
voice.
• Creative Team
This team will support the Creative Director in creating the graphic and text
assets needed to implement the plan.
• Technical Strategist
This person will make sure that the right tools are used for the job and that
the technology is supporting the digital strategy.
• Technical Team
This team will support the Technical Strategist by building, modifying and
integrating the various assets and properties outlined in the plan.
• Project Manager
This person will ensure on-time and on-budget delivery.
It is important that you have access early on to the people who will take your strate-
gies and plans and implement them in the form of websites, apps, widgets, email
campaigns, display ads and more. Especially on the technical side of things, you
will want to make sure that your approach is realistic. For instance, if you have a
tracking plan that involves integration between your emails, your website and your
CRM, you should have the conversation of exactly how that will work as early as
possible.
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39. Another often overlooked idea is that your technical team is there to not only get
things done but to help you figure out the best way to do it. Work with the team to
help them truly understand your goals and challenges in order to work out the best
solution. Many times they may help you uncover different (and better) ways of do-
ing things that increase efficiency or even the quality of data you are able to re-
ceive.
Timing
Just like the issue of having the right team, you are also most likely faced with re-
source constraints in the form of the time available to execute your plans. There
are only so many hours in a day, though we all might find ourselves working longer
hours when faced with a deadline such as a campaign launch.
It is important to make sure that the timing of your plan accurately reflects both
your budgetary limitations as well as the resources you (or your agency) have so
that your strategy can be most effective.
This also involves several questions, such as:
• Should we launch everything at once, or drip our campaign and marketing
elements out one by one?
• Launching is one thing, but what types of maintenance and upkeep (techni-
cal, content, measurement or more) will be required after launch?
• How long will it take to write, issue and execute an RFP for a particular
scope of work?
Answering things like this as soon as you can will eliminate countless headaches
down the road.
Infrastructure or Tools for the Job
Your digital strategy plan will need to be executed across a number of different
properties, platforms and tactics, including:
• Organizational website
• Supporting campaign websites
• Intranet
• CRM
• Social media
• Digital advertising
• PR/communications outreach
• Email marketing
• And much more
There are so many factors and decisions that go into making a choice of what plat-
forms and tools you will use as an organization — we won’t be going into those
here, but always keep in mind:
• Time needed to evaluate systems
• The upfront and long-term cost of those systems
• The staff or contractors needed to support those platforms and systems
• How the systems allow you to measure your effectiveness
• How fully the systems support integration with your marketing efforts
This is just a short list, but it should help you in your efforts. This is one of the
many times you will need to strongly rely on your technology team to help you with
the process. Sharing your unique challenges and working on solutions together will
go a long way here.
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40. Don’t Forget Measurement!
You have spent some long hours finalizing KPIs, determining key metrics, and de-
fining success. Make sure that as you are implementing your plan, you have all the
measurements in place that will give you the data you need to accurately report on
them. This can range from conversion tracking on a landing page to unique track-
ing URLs on advertisements to simple goal tracking on your website’s donation fun-
nel.
Make sure you get your technical team involved in this process and make sure that
they understand the goals you are measuring for. Many times there are tricks
within applications like Google Analytics that can accomplish some fairly sophisti-
cated tracking and measurement goals that just take a little research to uncover.
Compare your list of KPIs and key metrics to your properties and tactics and make
sure you are addressing them fully.
Phased Approach
For many reasons, you may not be able to execute your entire plan at once. There
can also be wisdom in rolling changes out slowly sometimes. You will need to deter-
mine what you gain (or lose) by launching all of the properties and tactics in your
digital strategy at the same time. Many times, it means you will need to delay a
launch in order to line up several deliverables.
When to Use a Phased Approach
Launching everything at once makes a lot of sense when you are also launching a
campaign or a rebranding effort. In fact those can be perfect times to work in your
digital strategy reassessment.
But if you don’t have the resources, time or budget to do everything at once, you
will need to determine a phased approach and rollout that compromises your strat-
egy as little as possible.
How to Prioritize
If you opt for the phased approach, you will need to make some compromises be-
tween the following:
1) What is most critical to your success
2) What is easiest to accomplish in the time frame
3) What fits within your budget
Depending on your organization, you may have the luxury of allowing #1 to dictate
what you do and when, but if you are like many nonprofits where time and budget
resources play a key role in determining when and how things get done, you may
not be so lucky.
39
41. If time and budget constraints exist, do your best to prioritize the properties and
tactics in an order such as the following:
• The strategy cannot be successful without this
• Would be useful, but not necessary
• Could wait six months or more
Try those categories and see if they work for you. You might have one to two other
buckets you need to add things to as well. The point here is to see what is truly criti-
cal to launch all at once and what can wait. You will obviously want to prioritize as
many of those must-have items for launch as possible. If budget doesn’t allow all of
them to launch at once, you can create subgroups of items. The goal is to launch as
many items as a whole piece as possible. For instance, you wouldn’t want to launch
a new email signup form on your website if your email marketing program isn’t
ready to launch at the same time. You also wouldn’t want to go to the effort of creat-
ing banner ads if you don’t have the budget for them until next quarter.
While compromise is never our preference, with the right phasing and the right pri-
oritization, it’s possible to release whole pieces of a strategy that can then be exe-
cuted and measured while other pieces are rolled out in the most logical order.
Support & Maintenance
This was briefly mentioned in a bullet point above in the section on infrastructure,
but we want to make special mention of it here. It is not enough to simply build
and implement your plan. You need to have a long-term plan and budget to sup-
port your efforts or you will face many more critical challenges down the road.
Lining up the right team to support you and your efforts and making the right plan
can be just as critical as setting them up. Even something as simple as the plan for
what happens when a campaign ends can (surprising as it may seem) be over-
looked by an organization that is tight on resources and time for planning.
You will need to plan for the team and time it will take to fully execute your digital
strategy; the best time to do that is as early on as possible. Make sure you think
through all the details and ask for advice from peers at both nonprofits and other
companies or agencies that do similar work.
Take a Step Back
Whether you just launched Phase 1 of 3 or just launched your entire digital strat-
egy, make sure that you are able to take a minute to celebrate this achievement.
While the process is not over, you have achieved something huge for your organiza-
tion at this point. You have researched, planned, created a strategy, and then
launched the assets necessary to execute the strategy.
Now, you have the opportunity to measure and evaluate the benefits of this new
digital strategy.
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42. 1
3
4
CHAPTER 6
Measurement
& Analysis
“Measurement is for guidance, not for back patting. The
metrics you choose, and the frequency of your reporting
should be structured to help you determine if you're doing
better today than you were yesterday. If so, where and
why? If not, where and why not? What can we adjust in our
suite of tactics in order to test a hypothesis about what
might work better in the near future.”
-Mike Arauz
43. Overview
With your plan either fully or partially implemented, there should be a collective
sigh of relief. You now have elements in place that are actively taking you towards
your organization’s goals. It’s time to see how your efforts are performing. With the
advent of a more socially connected Internet, as well as organizational adoption of
this two-way conversation in the acquisition process (whether it is for sales, dona-
tions, volunteers, etc.), the idea of the traditional funnel is fading.
While transactional pathways still use this as a way of tracking and managing suc-
cessful completions of donations or other actions, the consumer consideration proc-
ess has changed simply due to the readily available information from both search
and social mediums. Think of how
Googling is a verb, and how the answer to any question is moments away and (with
technologies like Siri) don’t always require typed input to ask a question.
Add to this the instantly available recommendations and feedback from your fam-
ily, Facebook friends or LinkedIn connections, who you may not even necessarily
be close to. Consider Nielsen’s report titled “Global Consumers’ Trust in ‘Earned’
Advertising Grows in Importance” from spring of 2012. In it they show that 92% of
consumers trust earned media, which includes word-of-mouth recommendations,
above other kinds of advertising such as paid media and the like.
Larry Weber, in his book Everywhere, puts it like this:
“Marketers spent a lot of time and money working the top of the funnel, try-
ing to build consumers’ brand awareness and consideration using tradi-
tional broadcast tools and techniques. These marketing messages were one-
way and were designed to be memorable in hopes of keeping brands at the
top of consumers’ minds.”
We are truly living in a different era, where effortless access to information now
shapes our decisions. We now have a decision funnel that is much less linear and a
lot more like this:
Team
For this portion, you are going to need some people that understand marketing,
math and the consumer journey through your online and offline properties. In
many cases, a well-rounded marketing professional can do this, though many
times we find that those who are more communications/PR-focused or even too
social media-focused do not have the high-level insight required for this type of
work on their own.
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Discover
Evaluate
Share
Engage
Convert
44. This is the part of the process that requires someone who enjoys and understands
statistics and analysis and isn’t going to get stumped by a little algebra if it’s called
for. See, your high school math teacher was right – you might need to use it again
now that you’re grown up!
Analysis
The analysis portion is critical because there are so many factors that can affect
how numbers move up and down month over month, quarter over quarter, or year
over year. It requires knowledge of both internal and external events as broad as
the economic impact in a geographic region or the beginning and end of a
marketing/advertising campaign.
Many times, if a number seems too good (or bad) to be true, there is an explana-
tion behind it. A 10,000% increase is possible through effective marketing, but
many times there is a simple explanation that requires just a little bit of research. It
is important that you have an answer for any questions you might get from your
leadership if there are some odd numbers in your reports.
At the end of the day, however, your analysis needs to show a few things:
• Results (whether good, bad, or neutral).
• What factors contributed to the positive or negative outcomes?
• What could have been done differently?
• What should be modified to improve results in the future?
Red Ant, in their terrific white paper “Planning and Managing a Digital Strategy,”
(http://www.redant.com/digital-strategy-whitepaper/) posed the question: “Did
the strategy bring more benefit to the business than the effort expended?” This is
the question you will need to answer.
A Note About Engagement
As you are doing your analysis, it is important to take engagement into account.
For instance, if your donations haven’t quite hit the levels you were hoping they
would, look for other signs of strength or weakness. Is your audience actively par-
ticipating with and sharing the content that you are putting out there on your site
and social media?
As Dave Evans and Jake McKee, in their book Social Media Marketing: The Next
Generation of Business Engagement, put it, “engagement readily happens in the
places where consumers and stakeholders naturally associate — which is why they
join up and spend time there.” If you have created a place (virtual as it may be) that
people feel comfortable sharing and talking about an issue or topics they care
about, you may have high levels of engagement even though some of your KPIs are
not benefitting from this yet.
The good news is this: engagement precedes the benefits that your KPIs are meant
to signal. Jim Sterne (Social Media Metrics) puts it this way:
• You can’t have profits without income.
• You can’t have income without customers.
• You can’t have customers without prospective customers.
• You can’t have prospects without suspects.
• You can’t have suspects without awareness.
Obviously this translates to a nonprofit as well. Make sure that your analysis and
reporting takes into account the leading indicators that can later translate into ac-
tion.
The challenge is this: how do you turn engagement into action? While every audi-
ence has its triggers, this question is something you will need to consider as you
determine several things:
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